Six months ago, the shouts of devotion on Algeria Square turned into political
chants, then shooting, then death. Yesterday, they turned into a football
song.

Inside the mosque, the lines of men raised their hands in a dutiful and heartfelt “Allahu akbar” as Sheikh Ahmed Qadour, their 76-year-old imam, told them they had a new chance to build a just Libya, now that the dictator who had told him what to say every week for 40 years had gone.

Outside, they remembered those who had died, some right in front of where they stood. “Martyrs of Libya, for you we give everything,” they sang.

But then their excitement got the better of them. Many slogans have been invented for the Arab Spring, but this one was universal. “Ole, olé, olé, olé,” they repeated, until they could hold back their mirth no longer and returned to their homes laughing.

The Libyan revolution is not over, and Col Gaddafi still has the power to cause immense harm. No one underestimates the task ahead for ordinary Libyans and their rebel government, and the danger posed by a newly militarised, factionalised youth.

But it is hard for has anyone who saw Algeria Square when it was in the Colonel’s grip, and his green-bandannaed youth were unleashing havoc on the Friday prayer crowds outside, to begrudge those who returned yesterday their optimism. They had freedom, they said, a future, and above all a hope that the best years of their children’s lives would not be wasted as theirs had been.

”That night, people were marching down September Street over there,” said Mohammed Ramadan, a 59-year-old civil engineer, of February 20, the day the revolution hit Tripoli. “Then the gangs came, shooting with anti-aircraft guns.”

Algeria Square sits behind the open seafront expanse known until Sunday as Green Square, and now as Square of the Martyrs. It is an atmospheric place, redolent of an earlier dictatorship – its grandiose marble columns date from its time as an Italian colony, under Benito Mussolini.

On that first day, protesters ran freely for several hours before the regime caught up with them. Over the coming weeks, order was forcefully restored, and by the time I first visited, Friday March 4, the mosque was the only safe gathering spot. If they lingered after prayers, the Gaddafi youths loitering outside would fire.

The relief yesterday could not have been further from the tension then, when a local teenager approached to tell me of the bloodstain on the pavement outside the square’s café. A man had just been shot dead, his body quickly taken away.

The teenager was memorable, speaking strongly accented English, the accent being that of North London where he had spent four years at school. “It’s just ****ing disgusting,” he said. “I was shocked coming back here. There ain’t no ****ing human rights, I tell you.”

Our conversation ended when the secret policeman with the mobile phone on the street corner clocked us, and the Libyan from Tottenham sprinted off into a side street. I think he got away.

Yesterday, despite the sound of gunfire in the distance, the mood could not have been more relaxed. Friends hugged. The mosque sat rapt in Sheikh Ahmed’s sermon, only stirring as he reached a crescendo himself.

”If a ruler is not just, he has no future,” he said. A worshipper climbed up and draped a tricolor revolutionary flag around his shoulders. The listeners raised their arms in the air.

Sheikh Ahmed was a young imam not long out of Tripoli University when Col Gaddafi seized power. The next four decades, he said after the service, were ones of careful balance, as he saw other imams arrested on the say-so of secret police dispatched among their congregations. “I always had to find the right words, to tell people what they needed to hear but not get into trouble,” he said. “Now I can speak freely.”

The ambiguity of his position was his flock’s own. “Libyans have never been cowards,” said Suleiman Hassi, 61. “But Gaddafi made us cowards.”

Gaddafi got at you by his threats to your wife, your sons, your daughters. He himself kept his job at the housing ministry.

Mr Hassi insisted that fears Libya would fall apart were false. Like many Libyans, he has huge optimism. Libya was a democratic country before, he said, and educated. “We know how to do this.”

There are many reasons to doubt him, even if his war is won. But in Algeria Square yesterday it was a belief you wanted to share.